The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [9]
"There’s a message from the Provincial for you," Father Tahad Kesai told him when he returned to their tent one sweltering afternoon, three hours late for what passed as lunch, a few weeks after the first anniversary of his arrival in Sudan.
Sandoz came to a halt and stared, tired and green-faced under the tent fabric. "Right on schedule," he said, dropping wearily onto a camp stool and flipping open his computer tablet.
"Maybe it’s not a reassignment," Tahad suggested. Sandoz snorted; they both knew it would be. "Goat shit," Tahad said irritably, mystified by the way their superiors were handling Sandoz. "Why won’t they let you serve out a full assignment?"
Sandoz said nothing so Tahad busied himself sweeping sand back out to the desert, to give the other priest a little privacy as he read the transmission. But the silence went on too long and when Tahad turned to look at Sandoz, he was disturbed to see that the man’s body was beginning to shake. And then Sandoz put his face in his hands.
Moved, Tahad went to him. "You’ve done good work here, Emilio. It seems crazy to keep pulling you from hill to valley..." Tahad’s voice trailed off.
Sandoz was, by this time, wiping tears from his eyes and making terrible whining sounds. Wordlessly, he waved Tahad in closer to the screen, inviting him to read the message. Tahad did, and was more puzzled than ever. "Emilio, I don’t understand—"
Sandoz wailed and nearly fell off the stool.
"Emilio, what is so funny?" Tahad demanded, bewilderment turning to exasperation.
Sandoz was asked to report to John Carroll University outside Cleveland in the United States, not to take up a post as a professor of linguistics, but to cooperate with an expert in artificial intelligence who would codify and computerize Sandoz’s method of learning languages in the field so that future missionaries would benefit from his wide experience, for the greater glory of God.
"I’m sorry, Tahad, it’s too hard to explain," gasped Sandoz, who was on his way to Cleveland to serve as intellectual carrion for an AI vulture, ad majorem Dei gloriam. "It’s the punchline to a three-year joke."
AS MANY AS thirty or as few as ten years later, lying exhausted and still, eyes open in the dark long after the three suns of Rakhat had set, no longer bleeding, past the vomiting, enough beyond the shock to think again, it would occur to Emilio Sandoz to wonder if perhaps that day in the Sudan was really only part of the setup for a punchline a lifetime in the making.
It was an odd thought, under the circumstances. He understood that, even at the time. But thinking it, he realized with appalling clarity that on his journey of discovery as a Jesuit, he had not merely been the first human being to set foot on Rakhat, had not simply explored parts of its largest continent and learned two of its languages and loved some of its people. He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.
3
ROME:
JANUARY 2060
SEVENTEEN YEARS OR a single year later, on his way to see Emilio Sandoz a few weeks after their first meeting, John Candotti very nearly fell into the Roman Empire.
Sometime during the night, a delivery van had provided the last little bit of weight and vibration that could be withstood by a nineteenth-century street paved over a medieval